Sibylla Leon Guerrero, Ph.D.
Post-Doctoral Scholar, UC Irvine
About Me
Sibylla Leon Guerrero is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine, School of
Education. She takes a interdisciplinary approach across education, psychology and cognitive
neuroscience to understand how early bilingual and bidialectal language experience shape later
language and literacy development. She received her B.A. from Stanford University and taught in K-12
and teacher training for many years before returning to school to obtain a Master’s and Ph.D. from
Harvard University. Her work is currently supported by a NSF-SPRF fellowship in the social,
behavioral and economic sciences.
Research Interests:
bilingualism, bidialectalism, literacy, quantitative methods
Recent Publications:
Leon Guerrero, S., & Luk, G. (2021). Synergetic themes in cognitive and sociocultural bilingualism
research: Moving toward a transdisciplinary approach. In E. Bauer, L. Sánchez, Y. Wang, & A.
Vaughan (Eds.), A transdisciplinary lens for bilingual education (pp. 10–32). Routledge.
Leon Guerrero, S., Whitford, V., Mesite, L., & Luk, G. (2021). Text complexity modulates cross-
linguistic sentence integration in L2 reading. Frontiers in Communication, 6, 115.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.651769
Smith, S. A., Leon Guerrero, S., Surrain, S., & Luk, G. (2021). Phonetic discrimination, phonological
awareness, and pre-literacy skills in Spanish–English dual language preschoolers. Journal of
Child Language, 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000920000768
Luk, G., Mesite, L., & Leon Guerrero, S. (2020). Onset age of second language acquisition and
fractional anisotropy variation in multilingual young adults. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 56,
100937. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100937